I totally flubbed this one and now it’s all over the ‘net, but the Mars rover Spirit is one-year old today. Originally slated for a 2-month mission, it’s so exceeded it’s expected performance it’s actually starting to overcome some of the bad press NASA has had in the past few years.
JPL has a really cool Flash retrospective on their site and people on Slashdot are bitching that it’s all a PR stunt. Yeah, ’cause it’s easy to stage a successful mission.
Project Gutenberg, the site with thousands of free books available for download, has posted their top 100 of 2004. It’s amazing to look at the great stuff availble for free thanks to the contributions of thousands of people all over the world. I need to get my Franz Kafka formatted and/or printed.
Ok, someone is even more obsessed than I thought possible and has set down the entire script of the Flying Circus episodes from Monty Python. Check out the homepage for even more weird resources. Very cool.
So, I’m lazy (and busy) but mostly lazy, and haven’t posted my Christmas post. Not that I had some huge thing to post or deep insights into the Season, but it can hardly go without a mention.
Obviously, my big gift to myself was building my computer (and buying the parts). J– got her pink iPod mini (and she was surprised, thankfully!). She gave me a Wusthof Classic Santoku (or Asian) knife, a ton of sushi-making materials (which work wonderfully, I might add), way too much chocolate, and a nice broadcloth white shirt. I know I’m forgetting something, but we had a good Christmas between the two of us, and not just for the gifts. Although, the gifts were nice, especially the stuff from our parents. Automatic coffee maker, with built in grinder, you are wonderful, if a bit noisy. They should put decibels rating on packing for those things.
Of course, it wouldn’t be Christmas without the families. All in all, the gatherings weren’t that bad, considering the sheer volume of parent/famliy exposure we subjected ourselves to, it’s a wonder we haven’t throttled anyone, much less each other.
Oh! I know what I forgot. And I’m wearing it for the love of Pete. J– got me a T-shirt with a Get Fuzzy panel on it! I love that comic. Yeah, it’s a well-worn path of comic strip, but it’s so funny to me because the cat, Bucky, is the perfect example of how I imagine our cat Mina to be. Sarcastic, scheming, and somewhere barely underneath her skin, ready to usurp us at a moment’s notice. I’m trying to find the strip, but Comics.com only makes it easy to find the last 30 days of comics. This one was published on 11/24, if you’re interested.
Anyway, since we’re bored, we’re falling back on on consumeristics roots and going to Costco.. never been there, but I here it’s like a slightly less evil Sam’s Club. Hey, at least I don’t hear about Costco building stores literally on top of ancient ruins.
This has to be the weirdest use for a game mod I’ve seen in a while. Garry’s Mod allows you to pose the characters and actually construct new machines in-game. A cool hack to be sure, but the screens used to demo the mod are, uhm, odd, to say the least.
Tonight, J– and I went out for Chinese food. Which is to say, we went to a strip mall that served food cooked by Chinese-Americans. We had Triple Vague Delight, Six Ways, with rice. Of course, at the end of the meal we got not just the bill. Oh no, we also got fortune cookies. Ah, fortune cookies, that wholly American contribution to an ironically obscure practice in China. By the way, no one in China had heard of fortunes stuffed into cookies before someone in the States saw the market for them.
I digress. I dutifully crack open my fortune cookie, fully expecting two things: 1) A stale cookie and 2) A cheesy fortune. I get neither. What I do get is a crispy yet tasty cookie and an interminalbly profound fortune. So profound that I immediately say to J–, “this has to be stolen from someone”.
The fortune? “Simplicity of character is the natural result of profound thought.” The source? Chinese proverb? Nope. William Hazlitt. Wonder if his heirs can sue a fortune cookie manufacturer.
I have to say, I have my doubts about the authenticity of this, but it’s damn funny, no matter where it came from. I’m especially enamoured of the response form at the bottom. Classic newsgroup rage.
My new machine is up and running. Actually, it’s been running for a while, I’ve just been playing with it so much I didn’t post.
One annoying thing to remember if you’re building a new system and expect to play any game made in the last 4 years. Many of the game publishers are putting DRM on their discs now which won’t allow you to play the game from a CD or DVD writer drive. You’ll need to add a CD-ROM drive to pass their system check, usually every time the game starts up. One more BS thing to keep in mind.
So, my system as running currently is:
As soon as I get a little more RAM and a KVM switch, I’m all set.
Oh, and just for the record, while time-consuming (it probably took me a decent 5 hours to assemble and configure the OS), this was way easier than I imagined it to be (knock on wood). A great learning experience and something I’ll have to do again, if for nothing else than the joy of actually building something that works. I can finally imagine what all the gearheads in the ’50s must have felt when that GTO finally turned over after a rebuild.
